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is that the primary decision-maker is the learner (to a certain age, his or her parents), then he or she should be provided with the necessary information.
• Tailor-made approach: emphasis on autonomous and motivated learning. A service that has a strong drive to adjust to demand is also interested in generating de-mand. In theory, no other services are as lucky as education: generating demand for further learning, that is, strengthening the motivation to learn is a legitimate goal in education. What is already a practice in private language schools, that is, the measurement of the results of prior learning and adjusting the programs, is not necessarily a daily practice in formal learning settings. But, formal schooling, being a giant machinery of mass education, can be tailor-made only through separate, individualized teaching according to some educationalists. However, through the enrichment of learning opportunities and teaching methods, even formal schooling can be made much more responsive to individual needs, learn-ing styles, and interests of learners at any level of education.
• Reconsideration of goals: connecting internal and external effectiveness. As mentioned earlier, the external references to the design of concrete educational targets are increasingly important. Focusing on the learning needs of the learners puts even greater emphasis on the labor market and social relevance of education. If the invested time and effort of the learner does not yield any returns, autonomous, motivated, and active learning remains an illusory expectation. As far as primary and secondary education is concerned, learning to learn must be a goal of special weight.
In South Eastern Europe, lifelong learning is often misconstrued as simply meaning participation in adult education. It is a serious mistake; as the previous characteristics of the lifelong-learning approach indicate, they all have serious implications for all levels of education from preschool education till “third generation” learning (i.e., learning during retirement).
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However, the crisis of the traditional selection method was not caused by the exhaustive amount of knowledge; it was the underlying logic of setting goals for education that was increasingly questioned.
This crisis was caused by several parallel processes; a few of them have been indicated already. The most important processes are the following:
• The dissolution of consecratory knowledge codes. The content of education is very much determined by the cultural codes of educators, themselves. As highly-trained intellectuals, educators transmit their own consecrated knowledge codes via their expectations of the students—regardless of the actual means of trans-mission (e.g., curricula, textbooks, or daily pedagogical practice). These cultural codes are very much rooted in the traditions of each country. For example, due to the excellent and popular translations made by a famous Hungarian poet, Hungarian secondary school students learn much more about Francois Villon than French students. However, these intellectual codes are increasingly dissolv-ing in emergdissolv-ing and diverse subcultures.
• The accumulation of knowledge and the transformation of the sciences. The accu-mulation of knowledge leads to the diversification of the structure of sciences mainly by the birth of new independent disciplines and by the emergence of others that are multidisciplinary. In contrast, the organization of school subjects still reflects old academic divisions of knowledge that cause difficulties in teach-ing complex phenomena like the greenhouse effect or evolution.
• Pragmatic and instrumental approaches gain dominance. As has been suggested several times, the need to better connect education with its external references in order to make it more relevant for learners puts an ever greater emphasis on practical and applicable knowledge. Its application being contextual by defini-tion, the huge variety of possible contexts devalues those pieces of knowledge that are not constructed with their applicability in mind.
• An open future. “Preparing students for work and life,” traditionally considered to be the main purpose of education, is increasingly a hopeless endeavor, because the professions they will practice, the technology they will use, the means of entertainment they will enjoy, the work organizations within which they will cooperate with others, etc., do not even exist yet. Anyone who tries to set goals for education, even for the period of mandatory schooling, shoots at a moving target. Therefore, instead of transmitting knowledge that becomes obsolete very fast, education should concentrate on the development of the capacity of students to adapt to changes.
• Knowledge as an economic resource. Knowledge has always been an asset; however, knowledge became the most important asset when it became the most
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tant source of economic added value in the so-called “knowledge economies.”
Therefore, human resource development considerations overwrite the old liberal tradition of education.
• The end of the knowledge monopoly of schools. Due to the pressure on the curricula, the amount of knowledge taught in schools is increasing. However, this is not comparable to the billion-fold ballooning of information that can be reached on the Internet in minutes. Memorizing information is not attractive to students when it can be “Googled” with the stroke of a key on the computer.
• Accumulating our knowledge about knowledge. During the last two decades, brain research and cognitive psychology accumulated a great deal of understanding about how effective learning occurs, while traditional ways of teaching very often handle the minds of learners as black boxes that simply replicate knowledge input.
Due to the cumulative impact of all these reasons, goals for educational services should be set in terms of competencies. The shift from the way of setting subject knowledge goals for educational services has distinct stages: making knowledge more applicable by “subject competencies,” then experimenting with cross-subject competen-cies, such as problem solving and communication (see Chapter 11).
The Learning Outcomes: Competencies
Competencies, that is, the complex ability to do something for specific purpose in a specific context, are constructed by knowledge, skills, and attitudes. Reconstructing the evolution of the concept of competencies is far beyond the purpose of this book. What is important here is that emphasizing the three key components of competencies is the appropriate means of balancing the two traditional approaches to the desired learning outcomes: the strong focus of general education on knowledge versus the limited scope of vocational training of practical occupational skills. Nevertheless, many regard the emphasis on the development of competencies as the “vocationalization” of general education, while others share the suspicion that it is no more than a new attempt to smuggle general education back to vocational training. Nevertheless, competencies became the prevailing underlying concept of setting goals for education. As a result, contemporary learning outcomes and competencies are often used as interchangeable terms that indicate the career of competencies. In very general terms, learning outcomes are “statements of what a learner knows, understands and is able to do on completion of a learning process”
(CEDEFOP 2008).
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This career of competencies originates in the effort of the mid-1980s to make voca-tional education and training more relevant by the funcvoca-tional analysis of occupations.
Vocational training being oriented towards the application of knowledge, it is almost a natural development. However, due to the needs generated by the reconsideration of relevant knowledge in education, in the second part of the 1990s determining goals in terms of competencies started to spill-over to general education, too. The Definition and Selection of Competencies (DeSeCo) Program launched by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in 1997 (and that provided the framework for the PISA surveys from 2000), played an instrumental role in the “expan-sion” of competencies. Since competencies, in general, can be as varied as the number of possible contexts within which knowledge is applied, there was a need to select those
“key” competencies on which education should focus. The selection of key competencies in the DeSeCo Program was based on three criteria (Rychen 2006):
• The competencies that are playing a part in the achievement of those outcome results that are highly valued for their contribution to successful life and well-functioning society at the levels of the individuals and society as a whole.
• The competencies that contribute to performing serious and complex require-ments within a wide range of contexts.
• The competencies that are important for all.
Partly on the basis of the results of the DeSeCo Program, the European Union developed its Reference Framework of Key Competencies in the early 2000s. The EU’s key competencies for education are divided into eight groups (Eurydice 2002):
• Communication in mother tongue,
• Communication in foreign languages,
• Mathematical competencies and basic competencies in science and technology,
• Digital competence,
• Learning to learn,
• Interpersonal, intercultural and social competencies, and civic competencies,
• Entrepreneurship, and
• Cultural expression.
All the detailed descriptors of the key competencies refer to the “abilities to ….”
The EU key competencies fall into three categories: (1) measurable cognitive competen-cies (e.g., mathematical competencompeten-cies), (2) competencompeten-cies that require a high degree of
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cross-curricular organization (e.g., learning to learn) and (3) certain underpinning trans-versal competencies (e.g., problem solving or creativity) (CEDEFOP 2008). The EU reference framework provided the basis of the revision of curricula in several member states, as well as the development of the European Qualifications Framework.
The Learning-outcomes Approach
The prevailing underlying concept of international mainstream educational policies is currently based on the learning-outcomes approach. This approach is the result of two parallel processes: the growing emphasis on learning and learning pathways instead of emphasizing teaching and school structure (lifelong learning), and the gradual reconsid-eration of relevant school knowledge, i.e., the growing focus on applicable knowledge (competences) that is, on the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that enable the learner to do things in diverse contexts.
Determining the goals for education in terms of learning outcomes opens a wide range of opportunities for the governance of education, and some of them are related to the difficulties that flow from the use of participation-related indicators. First, the focus on learning outcomes instead of (teaching and learning) processes makes it possible to create a direct chain of interpretation that connects external references of education with concrete educational goals.
Figure 5.1
Connecting Goals with External References: The Interpretation Chain
The second impact of the learning-outcomes approach is that, here, education’s relevance to the labor market is not a question that applies only to the design of voca-tional programs. Due to the shift of emphasis from employment to employability, that is, to the potential of the individual to hold onto and to be successful in the workplace,
Educational targets External references
Selection of key competencies
Relevant competencies for clusters of activities
Analysis of what individuals
actually do
Analysis of processes in economy and in social life
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general education’s contribution and relevance to the labor market is increasingly con-sidered. Also, the learning-outcomes approach weakens the monopoly of professional educators in determining education’s goals, because focusing on competencies makes it possible to involve laymen, too. (Not surprisingly, the contribution of stakeholders to the identification of new competencies in certain countries was vastly more useful than the conceptual work done by experts.) As a result, involving employers in the discourse on the goals for the initial phase of primary education is not regarded as “perverted”
anymore.
An additional advantage is the much easier translation of goals that are set in terms of learning outcomes to teaching. For example, certain social policy goals, such as the integration of minorities, sustainable development, or promoting democratic civic at-titudes, are becoming interpretable for pedagogy; therefore, they can be broken out from the “ghetto” of extracurricular activities and can be integrated into the mainstream of education. In general, detaching the problems of participation and qualifications from the actual outcomes of learning makes the interpretation of participation-related mat-ters much easier. Focusing on learning outcomes instead of inputs and processes allows education to better serve certain lifelong learning-related goals, such as connecting the subsectors of education (i.e., general, vocational, higher, and adult education) to the competencies to be developed or the recognition of informal learning.
The learning-outcomes approach, departing from subject knowledge and from process orientation, is a paradigm shift; as such, it has major implications for the content of all other major public policy expectations of educational services like quality or equity. It also influences all aspects of education and has implications for teaching, for the work of schools, and for the pattern of governance, too. All these implications will be discussed in the following chapters.